During periods of drought, a native Australian grass, Tripogon loliiformis, “plays dead” to reserve its energy for when it is later resurrected by water, according to researchers from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). While a few other plants do this too, all of them known as “resurrection plants,” the QUT team notes that this ability may provide genetic keys to designing plants with a tolerance for increasing global temperatures.

“Global climate change, increasingly erratic weather and a burgeoning global population are significant threats to the sustainability of future crop production, but resurrection plants present great potential for the development of stress tolerant crops,” Dr. Brett Williams, one of the study researchers from the QUT, said in a news release, adding that their findings could be applied to world food crops such as chickpeas.